We can't. There have to be things that are impossible, there have to be strict rules, when you want an ordered, functioning universe. If anything were possible, the universe wouldn't exist.

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Just because you can't break the rules doesn't mean you can't get around them somehow. An Alcubierre drive or wormholes or travling "around" space using higher dimensions could very well be possible.

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With a bucket of color there can also be blue elefants.

I see the point, but while we can keep up the research, the general public still needs to learn to accept that a lot of stuff we see in fiction simply will NEVER be possible.

There also is no bending the rules, that's a concept that applies for man made laws, not for the laws of nature. If the laws of physics allow Alcubierre drive and wormholes, then it's within the rules. You don't "bend the rules", because that's impossible.

I recently talked to physicists about the holograms in Iron Man 2, for example. It is never going to happen. You cannot project glowing 3D objects into normal, breathable air and interact with them. It's not a question of time and money. It's simply never going to work. It's just a wet dream.

There are FTL possibilities that are compatible with the laws of our universe so far. If nobody used them so far, a future where we use them is possible, and is one of the potential timelines that extend our own. Some of my parallel universe descendants will travel with warp drives. Exciting. Imagine if some of them are up to getting in bed with extraterrestrial individuals with long playful tails.

That's what any physicist would have said 100 years ago if you had asked him whether a large gravitational source could bend space itself.
Given the very little we know about the world and given the limited abilities of our primate brains "never ever" are not words you really wanna use.

That's what any physicist would have said 100 years ago if you had asked him whether a large gravitational source could bend space itself.
Given the very little we know about the world and given the limited abilities of our primate brains "never ever" are not words you really wanna use.

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100 years is a long time, our understanding of physics skyrocketed in that time. And the properties of light is one of the things we understand pretty thoroughly and won't change. c is a constant that will remain. Or the particle wave duality. What we don't know is WHY it is like that, and that's where quantum mechanics will kick in at some point. But that explanation won't change the limitations. Which is why stuff like FTL travel and FTL communication on the one side, and Iron Man 2 or Star Trek style holograms on the other, won't work. Ever. Or lightsabers. Or visible laser beams in vacuum. Sound in space. Superman. Time travel. That is stuff that doesn't work because it's just fantasy.

Quantum entanglement, at least information can already travel faster than light. You build a quantum computer and you might be able to calculate stuff which is physically impossible with a normal computer.
Quantum mechanics implies all kind of crazy stuff so I doubt that we have, as you claim, learned most of what there is to learn about how the world ticks in the last 100 years.

Time travel would mess with causality. So what? Doesn't mean it is no possible, it merely means that our theory wouldn't be able to deal with it so we'd have to throw it out and get a better one. In science you do not rule out observations just because your current theory says they cannot exist.

That's what any physicist would have said 100 years ago if you had asked him whether a large gravitational source could bend space itself.
Given the very little we know about the world and given the limited abilities of our primate brains "never ever" are not words you really wanna use.

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100 years is a long time, our understanding of physics skyrocketed in that time. And the properties of light is one of the things we understand pretty thoroughly and won't change. c is a constant that will remain. Or the particle wave duality. What we don't know is WHY it is like that, and that's where quantum mechanics will kick in at some point. But that explanation won't change the limitations. Which is why stuff like FTL travel and FTL communication on the one side, and Iron Man 2 or Star Trek style holograms on the other, won't work. Ever. Or lightsabers. Or visible laser beams in vacuum. Sound in space. Superman. Time travel. That is stuff that doesn't work because it's just fantasy.

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Everything's just a fantasy, until it's not. Saying that something won't happen ever is absolute hubris.

We have learned a lot, but what we know is still a tiny fraction of what there is to know. You can't conceptualize how a holodeck might work based on current scientific knowledge any more than Da Vinci could conceptualize an iPhone. That doesn't mean it's impossible.

I agree with the spirit of what JarodRussell is trying to say, and that is early human beings were perplexed by their surroundings and tried to make sense of it, attribute some kind of order to things and the reasons why everything exists. Before you have any kind of scientific method, all you have is your limited observations and the expanse of imagination. This is why there are many different sets of independent religious scriptures, and why they contain numerous contradictions, errors, and conjured up stories. Even the Old/New Testaments contradict each other--the God depicted are two vastly different entities. And yet, due to the fervent desire for many to maintain a trusted familiar belief system, those people convince themselves that it's all correct and done that way for good reason. They rationalize it, or "fan wank" it.

Yet... we still have a mystery, of how the whole universe came to be. If there was any kind of intelligent orchestration to it, creating an enormously vast network of celestial bodies, our existence could just be a lucky side-effect. Our imaginings of God fabricated without any shred of credibility. Intelligent design doesn't automatically mean omnipotence. It's all a matter of scope.

As for the laws, well... we have had instances of establishing scientific laws and then finding they've been flawed, able to be superseded and redrawn with new parameters and boundaries. But we've also established laws that are hard fast, holding true for all subsequent theories that have been built upon it and thus folly to consider dangerously flawed. While I am optimistic about the capability of human imagination, I'm also pragmatic. As others have said, there have been plenty of ideas conjured up in science fiction that are just way too "out there" to have a chance of becoming reality down the road.

But I have to come back to the core, that being the technology that might even give a hope of "warp drive" or "wormholes" is just so far out there, we'd better worry about social evolution first... finding a way for humanity to exist in harmony, at sustainable levels of exploitation, in order to create the foundation for much greater scientific progress. We need to worry about that first.

Time travel would mess with causality. So what? Doesn't mean it is no possible, it merely means that our theory wouldn't be able to deal with it so we'd have to throw it out and get a better one. In science you do not rule out observations just because your current theory says they cannot exist.

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At some point there is a definitive finish line. Because otherwise the universe would be chaotic and fall apart. And there are still no observations of sound in space, FTL travel/communication or Superman, etc... .

Quantum entanglement, at least information can already travel faster than light. You build a quantum computer and you might be able to calculate stuff which is physically impossible with a normal computer. Quantum mechanics implies all kind of crazy stuff so I doubt that we have, as you claim, learned most of what there is to learn about how the world ticks in the last 100 years.

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FTL radio communication will still never ever be possible. And whatever things QM will bring, c is a constant that will never ever change. If there's such a thing as communication using quantum entanglement, then that might be going to work, but it won't be radio communication. If there's such a thing as Alcubierre drive, it might also work, but it won't be a conventional Newtonian drive. And even then there will be things that are just impossible because they don't work within the limits set by our own universe! You won't be able to do wizardry and create fantasy with Quantum Mechanics. That's just nonsense.

If I wanted to ask about the Ultimate Truths of the universe I probably wouldn't frame the question around anthropomorphic megabeings. Our ideas of god may not be coherent or meaningful. Better to just ask, "so how does reality really work"?